Some surgical procedures have been developed in which ice is utilized to reduce the temperature of certain organs or parts of the body during surgery. For example, in performing certain operations such as a nephrolithotomy, it has been found highly advantageous to pack finely divided ice in the wound around the kidney, after opening of the body cavity and from time-to-time during the operation. However, as with all instruments or materials that may come in contact with a wound during surgery, the ice used in such surgical procedures must be highly sterile, herein referred to as surgical sterile, and the production of surgical sterile ice has presented some problems. It has heretofore been the practice to produce the sterile ice required for surgery by providing a sterile liquid in a sealed flexible plastic bag and refrigerating the bag in a freezer until the liquid is a solid mass. When sterile ice is required for an operation, the bag with its frozen liquid contents is removed from the freezer and the bag then pounded with an implement to break up the ice mass, after which the bag is opened to discharge the crushed ice contents into a sterilized receptacle from which the crushed ice is removed for use during the operation. Crushing of the ice in a closed bag with an implement is not only cumbersome and laborious, but also frequently results in a rupturing of the bag. Rupturing of the bag during pounding on the bag to break-up the ice, destroys the sterility of the ice contents in the bag and effectively precludes the use of the ice in that bag in a surgical procedure. Further, it is difficult to obtain uniform finely divided ice by pounding on the frozen ice mass while it is in a sealed bag.
It has heretofore been proposed for example as shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,402,567; 3,456,577; 3,811,494 and 3,930,535, to make soft ice machines with some provision for sanitizing the machines to some degree with chemicals and/or heat. However, such machines are not adapted to be sterilized to the high degree required to provide a surgical sterile ice product suitable for use in surgery. The freezing cylinders in these machines are formed as an integral part of the cabinet and refrigeration mechanism of the machine, and it is not possible to position the freezing cylinders of such machines in an autoclave or to otherwise heat such freezing cylinders to the temperatures and for the times required to obtain the high degree of sterility required to produce a surgical sterile ice. Further, the ice removers in these machines are driven by shafts that extend through a wall of the freezing cylinder and this not only aggravates the problem of sterilizing the machine to the degree required for surgical use but also presents a possible source of contamination of the ice product.